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What am I doing wrong?

Can someone please tell me what I am doing wrong. I just want to make some small icons, for a message board script I am working on. Like this one. I want to make a small blue emvelope to be displayed when there are unread posts. I have been trying for a few hours, using paint shop pro. I can't get anything that looks even like what it should. I get the outline ok, but when everything goes wrong...

I put the images here. The first one looks ok I guess, it's not very good but the outline is almost stright. When I colored the emvelope it all when stupid... I have this problem with all the images I make. When I put a line or somthing on the canvas it makes different shades of the same color around the line, when when I change the color, everything looks like... crap (can I say crap on the forums?)

I put the files here, it says there are two, but I can't see them.
Can't you see your own attachments?

I don't see your files yet. I think they have to be reviewed before we can see them.

But what you're describing sounds like antialiasing, which is used to smooth out the jagged lines you'd see in diagnoals and curves on larger images. Usually when you're designing tiny icons it's better to turn the antialiasing off. You can find the option in your tool options palette.

O! O! I just tried turning off that option you said, and I think that might be the problem.

Maybe when the images get up you can tell me for sure. I'll try to make them again tomorrow, I'm too tired tonight to try and make the images again.

OK, after looking at the images I've got several ideas for you:

One, you can turn off antialiasing as I suggested before. With small icons you may lose too much detail otherwise.

Another option would be to draw using Paint Shop Pro's vector lines and shapes. Check the option in tool options palette. Then you can easily change the fill or line color, or line width and style for that matter. This also makes resizing alot easier!

If however you don't want to put the energy into redrawing the shapes, and if you've done them in black on white, you can color them fairly easily by adding a new layer with "multiply" as the blending mode and painting the colors on there.

On psp, when you want to change the color of something, you have 2 options that work the best...

colors>colorize
colors>adjust>red/green/blue

You can mess with the settings to get the color you want. If you just want to avoid also changing the background color of your image you'll need to make a selection on the envelope only. They way you do that is

select>all
Then by using the selection tool (the dashed rectangle) from the toolbar on the left, click the envelope. Then adjust the colors.

Instead of making new images, why don't you just find some nice free ones?

I got a few free ones. I would like to get more, but someone told me that those are sometimes stolen property. Since I don't really know who created the images I don't want to take a chance of using some stolen stuff. Unless there is a way to verify that the images are not stolen